11 December 2016

Divertimento #119

"A survey of 29 wind farms showed that 194 bats a month were killed,
although the figure is likely to be higher because many of the dead
creatures would have fallen prey to scavengers... If the figure was extrapolated to
all of Britain’s onshore wind farms it could mean that around 80,000 bats are being killed each year by turbines."

gif: giving homeless people simple gifts. Notice the response of the man at 0:30 to getting a jacket.

Showerthought: "When people think about travelling to the past, they worry about accidentally changing the present, but no one in the present really thinks they can radically change the future."

"The decomposing corpses are strewn among 7,000 pounds of propane tanks,
tarps, car batteries, fertilizers, pesticides, banned rodenticides from
Mexico, and other trash, plus 4,000 pounds of irrigation line blanketing
an abandoned 20,000 plant illegal marijuana grow site in northeastern
California’s Lassen National Forest. What was once unspoiled landscape
is now a pockmarked 12-acre slagheap reminiscent of no man’s land."

"No One Dies Alone is a simple and economical plan. It is basically a
voluntary, unpaid phone-tree program in which volunteers sign up on an
Internet site for a week, during which time they pledge to be available
to stay with a dying patient. At PeaceHealth, a two-hour minimum bedside
vigil assignment is preferred. The volunteers are comprised of hospital
employees as well as existing unpaid volunteer staff."

"Earlier this year, experts began noticing that cybercriminals were using ransomware to target hospitals — organizations that are heavily reliant
on instant access to patient records. In March 2016, Henderson,
Ky.-based Methodist Hospital shut down its computer systems after an infection from the Locky strain of ransomware. Just weeks before that attack, a California hospital that was similarly besieged with ransomware paid a $17,000 ransom to get its files back."

"A factoid is not a small fact. It's a mistaken assumption repeated so often that it is believed to be true. At least, that was the meaning ascribed to the word by Norman Mailer,
who is widely credited with coining it, in his 1973 biography of
Marilyn Monroe. Mailer said factoids were "facts which have no existence
before appearing in a magazine or newspaper"."

"A man with an air horn that sounds like a train has allegedly been
terrorising the residents of El Segundo, California, for weeks, and
police have just made an arrest after finding the man accused of the
noise with air horn equipment inside his car." (awesome mugshot)

"An Oregon man who died in June
after falling into a boiling hot spring at Yellowstone National Park
was looking for a place to “hot pot,” or soak in warm water... By the time they returned the next day, the body had dissolved in the boiling waters, according to the report. The only traces were Scott’s wallet and melted flip-flops."

gif: when your soccer team is so bad the fans help the team try to find the net. chuckleworthy.

Showerthought: "The abbreviation for down (dn) is just "up" upside-down."

How Wisconsin's prairies are evolving: "Some sites, the research team found, had fewer than 18 percent of the species documented in the 1950s survey, and some were now made up of more than 60 percent non-native species."

LifeProTip: Always take a quick photo of your luggage before handing it over when boarding a plane. In the event that your luggage gets lost it will help immensely when filling out the paperwork.

"It is a problem faced across the United States, and the next victim could be Dallas. The city’s mayor said it appeared to be “walking into the fan blades” of municipal bankruptcy."

"Independent experts" bullshit: "On its website, Kellogg touted a "Breakfast
Council" of "independent experts" who helped guide the company's
nutritional efforts. Nowhere did it say this: The
maker of Froot Loops paid the council members and fed them talking
points, according to a copy of a contract and emails obtained by The
Associated Press."

Aloe vera bullshit: "The aloe vera gel many Americans buy to soothe damaged skin contains no evidence of aloe vera at all. Samples
of store-brand aloe gel purchased at national retailers Wal-Mart,
Target and CVS showed no indication of the plant in various lab tests.
The products all listed aloe barbadensis leaf juice — another name for aloe vera — as either the No. 1 ingredient or No. 2 after water.
There’s no watchdog assuring that aloe products are what they say they are..."

Parmesan cheese bullshit: "... Castle Cheese Inc. was doctoring its 100 percent real parmesan with
cut-rate substitutes and such fillers as wood pulp and distributing it
to some of the country’s biggest grocery chains."

For butterfly enthusiasts: homepage for the Monarch Joint Venture. "Recognizing that North American monarch (Danaus plexippus)
conservation is a responsibility of Mexico, Canada and the United
States, as identified in the North American Monarch Conservation Plan,
this Joint Venture will work throughout the U.S. to conserve and protect
monarch populations and their migratory phenomena by implementing
science-based habitat conservation and restoration measures in
collaboration with multiple stakeholders."

btw - I've decided I ought to begin numbering my linkdumps so that I can
reference them more precisely. Only about the last quarter of them have
been entitled "divertimento"; before that they were "smorgasbords" or
had a wide range of other titles. They are all collected here.

Embedded images: "Two centuries ago,John Thomas Smithset out to record
the last vestiges of ancient London that survived from before the Great
Fire of 1666 but which were vanishing in his lifetime." Details about these images, and more images at Spitalfields Life, where they are clickable to wallpaper size.

Oops. That was a blogging-too-fast error. Tx for the heads-up. Interestingly when I tried to insert the original link, it wasn't valid, but a quick keyword search turned up many other articles, so I linked to the one at... Cosmo.

"A man with an air horn that sounds like a train has allegedly been terrorising the residents of El Segundo, California, for weeks, and police have just made an arrest after finding the man accused of the noise with air horn equipment inside his car."

Sounds like he went off the rails ...

Lurker111

Edit/note: BTW, yesterday I tried to post and both the Publish and Preview buttons just blanked out the text area. I'm using Firefox on Win7. Anyone else see this, or was I hallucinating?

Re: the "English" words of Indian language origin, I'm reminded of the BBC series Goodness Gracious Me where a recurring character believes that everything in the world is Indian, from da Vinci to the British Royal Family. Here's a link to the transcript of an episode where he talks about all the words that English borrowed from India (which, in his opinion, would be the entire English language!)

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net